unleashing the greater potential of organizations

12/01/2008

What are the "first steps" in building a Creative Hive?

You begin by transforming your mind from "intention" to "attention," as you more seriously approach harvesting the potential innovation within your organization's ecosystem. To reliably gain the "fruits of minds" from your sphere of reach and influence requires disciplined and sustained attention, ...no more, ..no less.

Though this seems logical and simple on the surface, a shift of attention can be a deceptively non-trivial matter. The implications for you and your organization can be far reaching. Consider:

Every organization is perfectly designed

to produce its present positive and negative realities.

If an organization seeks to have different realities,

it must change its design.

Such a change will not dependably take place

without a critical mass of sustained attention.

Bringing about an appropriate degree of personal attention requires that you and any other applicable leaders must first possess heightened awareness and acknowledgement of a few of the critical underlying fundamentals. To begin to gain the prerequisite degree of awareness of these Creative Hive fundamentals most effectively, the following steps are strongly advised:

A) Read: Ideas Are Free. This book is a quick read and generally well-aligned with the Creative Hive construct. The content provides an introduction to a few essential principles. Though this book is somewhat incomplete as to guiding a practical execution (... but aren't they all?), and perhaps has a few contradictions in some areas, I consider this book to be one of the best available in the domain for early mind expansion. Most importantly, this book strives to purge many commonly-held, but erroneous or problematic viewpoints about workplace innovation. The authors offer to the reader a seasoned, widely-travel vantage in organizational successes and failures in attempts to harvest innovation.

B) Read: Work's A We Thing. In reading Ideas Are Free, and from Characteristics of a Creative Hive elsewhere in this blog, you perhaps appreciate that the cornerstone of Creative Hive is establishing "creative thought and expression" as an explicit expectation within every work role.The importance of this factor cannot be overstated!

For most organizations the easy-to-consume content of Work's A We Thing quickly introduces the merit of significantly remodeling relationshipswith workers, so as to achieve greater performance (in this context namely, creative expression). The most reliable way to accomplish such personal work role performance is by adopting and practicing Relationship Performance™.

This book is primarily written to be distributed to each of your workers (and to your qualified candidates). However, it also effectively serves as introductory guide for anyone wishing to understand the fundamentals of Relationship Performance. Upon completion of the book, it may be clear why these organizing principles are the preferred way to "set the stage" for building your Creative Hive (when they are commonly shared throughout your organization).

C) Read: Strategic Innovation... this substantive book quickly and comprehensively describes how Whirlpool found a reliable path toward becoming a Creative Hive. Many major points are presented in a comprehensive, but easy-to-consume manner. This content appears to be an honest and realistic reporting of both the victories and the non-trivial challenges Whirlpool's leadership have experienced. I consider the guidance to be of extreme valuable to organization embarking on the trail to innovation improvements. In fact, by consuming this book, there may be no need for your organization to completely reinvent "the wheel" (read the book, you'll see what I mean).

Think of these three books as your "innovation tripod" to form and steady your early thinking. By reading and thoughtfully considering the content of the three above books, you should have entered into a healthy, hungry novice's perspective of the various areas that merit your attention.

Then...

D) Read and consider the topic: "Two matrixes describing critical areas in Creative Hive™ design and execution" within this blog's "Getting Underway" section (likely by scrolling below): This content may serve to better enlighten you to the various basic dimensions that are awaiting your Creative Hive attention and leadership.

E) Read and consider the "evolving content" of: "Want Innovation that resonates? A farming analogy can be your guide. (also within this "Getting underway" section, below). The purpose of this content is to provide you with a thought provoking analogy as you enter the process of architecting innovation competences and programs within your organization.

I strongly advise the above six items precede any Creative Hive decisions, actions or initiatives.

Pursuing a Creative Hive a is process of installing and developing new core competencies within the organization. For those who may be interested: so much of crafting and sustaining Creative Hive competencies relates to learning (...and equally, unlearning). This being the case, it may be a good time to for you to revisit and reconsider Stephen Covey's well-proven and now classic model of how we typically move through a learning process ...from having "unconscious incompetence" to ultimately achieving "unconscious competence" (if you complete the full journey).

As you may appreciate from the below graphic, the six steps above should generate the awareness that helps you to move from the lower right to the lower left; whereas, your considering and learning from the steps above "begins" the journey upward from the lower left to the upper left. Then with disciplined application and sustained practice, you and all those in your organization finally can achieve movement from the upper left to upper right destination and rewards of "unconscious competence."